"Do you know where Jewel is from?"
"Nuh uh."
"Alaska."
"Cool!"
-- Sara and Brittany in the back seat on the way to the ice rink

We left the airport and stopped near the water at the end of the runway. A KAL cargo jet screamed over us and out Knik Arm, gaining elevation gradually and disappearing into the cloudbase. I sniffed the air, sensing the new land, trying to catch a whiff of my destiny. Does it lie here? I’ve felt the pull of Alaska for many years. Is it just a long distance romance, consummated so far with only books, pictures and stories? Or is it a for-real match that will draw me to live here someday? I kneel and dip a finger into the water to taste the salt from a far off ocean. It is brackish and diluted with icemelt. Indecisive.

With the three big bags carrying the folding Klepper kayak safely in the rental car and apparently unimpaled by stray MD-80 jackscrews, we went south to visit friends on the Kenai peninsula. Summertime coastal Alaska is green, greener than I expected, more verdant even than the rainforests where I grew up in coastal Oregon. The perpetual solstice sunlight pushes dusk to 2 AM and dawn to 4. The plants roil and soar. Even the slower growing spruce trees surge sprout-like from the bogs in monostem overgrowth, like they are getting ahead of themselves. However, a species of bark beetle has infested and killed 95% of the spruce trees on the lower Kenai peninsula, and the rust hues of the dead trees take the edge off the intense green.

Like everywhere, Alaska is in transition. The extended sunlight and extreme weather likely magnify the changes. When Captain cook explored here in the 18^th century, he made no mention of spruce trees on the Kenai. While it’s possible it was an omission due to obviousness (like upon entering another Northwest river bay: "More of those fir-like trees, Mr. Douglas, please make note of them…"), it’s likely that there were not many spruce here then. So in several hundred years there has been an infestation of spruce followed by an infestation of beetles (preceded by an infestation of people?). The ecosystems are either reeling or naturally cycling or searching for a new equilibrium (or all three) depending upon whether you consider the destiny of the world to be linear, or circular, or in search of some harmonious balance. Or if you consider your destiny to be a cabin with a woodstove on the Kenai, you might see a plethora of firewood, all elevated and seasoning nicely. Perspective is everything.

We met the water taxi in Whittier after coming through the "new road". When I heard that they had built a brand new road to Whittier where before there was only train service, I imagined newly blasted road cuts and spindly bridges over gorges. In reality, what they did is fill in the gaps around the railroad tracks through the 2.5 mile train tunnel under Maynard Mountain and initiate a system of traffic control to funnel both trains and cars through the one-lane tube. A local said this effort was pushed by the cruise ship companies with an eye toward making Whittier a cruise ship port much closer to Anchorage than the presently available choices. I believe him. The tunnel undermines a range of mountains, and in the course of a few minutes we encounter totally different temperatures, different weather, different ecosystems and radically different tides.

We wave g’bye to the water taxi and survey the beach. A pea-green double Klepper and the pile of grey, green and blue dry bags, and a whole lotta wilderness. We wonder if the bags will all fit in the boat and soon find that they will not. That’s what the newly sewn deck rigging is for. We wonder if we will fit into this big land of tides and moss and mist. That’s what the next six days are for.

Loaded and in the saddle, we paddle a bit, readjust gear. Readjust attitude. Find a pace to the paddling. From Hobo Bay we turn north toward the ice. Far from the ocean, we are padding on saltwater. Tides are magnified here, and our travelling bends to the relentless and inevitable push and pull of water and moon. The next few days will bring some of the highest and lowest tides of the year – a 20 foot sloshing – not as extreme as on the other side of the tunnel (40-50 feet) but still a whole heck of a bucket of water moving in and out of Port Wells and Harriman Fjord. The currents generated thus can reach 2 or 3 miles an hour, and in combination with "afternoon" winds, can make life very difficult or a breeze, depending. Pun intending. It’s like the gods take the tableau of the Sound and tilt it to and fro, like a washbasin, every 6 hours or so. And the river flows in and the river flows out. The great heart of the Chugach flexes and the seablood flows through the Barry Arm. To fight the tide is to paddle like a fool. And Those on Mt. Valhalla, 12,000 feet above and to the north, will giggle and laugh and blow a bit harder down the glacier tongues.

So we duck into a bay and wait for the tide to turn. Find a sunken dock once used for mining or logging or both. The seaweed at low tide is a pleasant mustard, hot like English brown mustard against the subdued greens of the second-growth spruce. A river flows into the bay and we follow its shallow and spectacularly clear fan upcurrent. There is an increasing roar of water on rock. There is darkness and lightness and color in patches below the surface. We turn a small bend in the fan and find the river plunging and splashing into the tidal lettuce and mussels. Surging and quieting and fanning out in a scene that must surely be so unique and magical that this moment alone cannot be repeated with another. But it is, and was, and will be. The fresh merges with the saline in ripples of density like clear syrup poured into a filled glass, like a summer night bends the air in a flicker of stars, like the glistening of sight at the return of one so loved.

Morning low tide makes the soul ache. All is stillness. A perception of mist lifts the air. The music of the Sound is played in a minor key. Drips from the paddle pitterpat pat. Movements slow in an effort of silence. An intense vulnerability falls about, like any slight stirring could raise a raging storm. There are soft-eyed children sleeping on the shoulders of the hills. The eyes of the ever snowed mountains droop and close with lenticular lids. Mussels crackle in a sensual peace. There is a turning of tide which cannot be sealed in a moment but is rather a slow spreading like the heavy dread before tears.

We ride the waxing tide to the Harriman glacier arms. Tall white cruise ships bear for the College Fjords, fouling the air and pushing slow wakes far across Port Wells. We hear distant thunder. Must be rain coming. Not the dousing wash of thunderstorms, but rather the slow creeping of centuries. Taffy tongues of ancient storms which brittle and break and crash in the distance. We see them now far over a bent horizon. Must be 8 miles away, but we still hear the thunder. Barry first, and then Cascade and finally Coxe. We round Pt. Doran and gape at them. The boat rides the tidal vortex around the point with the bergy bits and the incoming seawater. We swirl about and worry for the fragile skin of the boat against heavy ice. The sky is mostly clear and the thunder is clearer. So closely does it resemble electrical storming that I at first feel disappointed at the lack of a flash preceding. Like someone not tapping you on the shoulder to watch a coming crash.

The visual gratification comes upon closer approach. We unload the boat at a camp and paddle light toward them. Watching glaciers is like watching paint dry. Except big pieces of the wall separate suddenly and fall booming to the watery carpet below. We are wary of ice waves and keep a goodly distance between. I am mesmerized. Scale is difficult with the sizes and distances involved. The pieces which break seem small, but must be the size of small ships. Or larger. Perspective, once again, is everything. Cascade is steep and crevasse cut, like a frozen waterfall. The broken monoliths fall upon lower ice and disintegrate before reaching the water. Barry is flatter, calving less frequently, but in a bigger way. Coxe, although steeper than Barry, seems to bide its time. Waiting for what? The turn of a back? The sun to peak higher in its low arc? The others to quiet for a time so its splashing end might be more dramatic? I rename the glacier Vain. Coxe shouldn’t mind. He’s long dead and probably English. There is a slow creeping effort toward authenticité in this land. McKinley and eskimo are fading as names, replaced by Denali and Inuit. To call a glacier Vain is not quite in this vein, but certainly is without vanity.

A railroad magnate name Harriman funded an expedition up the Alaska coast at the end of the 19^th century. It’s purpose was a geographical and natural accounting of the coast from Vancouver to the Bering Sea. Harriman came along for the ride. Their sailing into this fjord was the first incursion of a big ship in these waters. The drawings and photographs from the expedition show the glaciers somewhat longer than they are now. Today, Cascade and Barry glacier barely touch, while 100 years ago they merged and pushed a shelf out on the water. Bare rock on the valleysides testifies to the former greater extent of the ice. Barry glacier almost doesn’t calve into the water anymore. Its terminal moraine is starting to show underneath. With continuing climatic change it’s possible that in another 100 years there will be left here a lagoon and a receeding wall of ice with alder trees working their way toward a proper thicket underneath. Or precipitation could increase and offset the warming trends with a new surge into the tides. The perspective of time is the only way to judge the precise shape of history here below the heights of ice. I bet all the crystalline wealth floating before me on the circling around of it all.

"Glaciers hung on the steep mountain sides all about us.

The scene was wild and rugged in the extreme. One

of the glaciers was self-named the Serpentine by reason

of its winding course down from its hidden sources in

the mountains—a great white serpent with its jaws set

with glittering fangs at the sea."

-- John Burroughs, member of the Harriman Expedition

Despite all of the raingear and extra clothing we packed for the Alaska wet, our faces were rosy with sunburn. The sun repellent was forgotten in the car in Whittier. Fortunately, we remembered the bug repellent. And head nets. We tried to pick camps with the potential for breezes, but the mild weather didn’t deliver. And invariably, just on the other side of the shore trees from our camp was a collection of mosquito bogs. The experience here was not without a balance of the pristine and the pesky.

Our camp in Harriman Fjord was near a Herring Gull rookery. The gulls chattered and squawked and negotiated incessantly about what seemed to be very pressing gull business. Pecking order or mate choice or nest site or whatever it was. Maybe it was just which one could sit on the peak of which spruce tree. At first we thought it was because we were disturbing them, but they continued carrying on in full gull babel when we were in the tent or out on the boat. The only respite came at high tide when the lot of them took their caterwauling out to the eddies off of Pt. Doran to dive at fish.

The fjord breathed ice. Some high tides would bring a choking and unnegotiable mass of bergy bits into the straights. A following low tide would strand the multitude of them, large and small, on the beaches around our point. The low sun shone through them in white and deep glacier blue hues. The ice was heavier than the eye would imply. Even the small bits had a heft like steel. Then we would paddle or sleep, and return to find the beaches and waters completely forgiven of ice. The white spread of ice shrubs shorn and swept to other arms or to melted oblivion. Without moving the cookstove, the scene from the kitchen camp leapt from season to season on just the turn of the tide.

Otters were with us everywhere. As we paddled, we would catch them napping on the slack tides or approach the frolicking play of a pair or trio. They seemed to feed on the changing tide. We watched from our camp as they dove for clusters of mussels, then paddled on their backs, stationary between the sliding bergy bits, tearing at the mussels and eating. They rarely seemed to feed alone. I had hoped to see a few otters on the trip, but I’d say we saw at least 10 a day. The otters were much more wary than curious, and I thought of the coyotes of the American West: they seemed to stay out of easy gunshot range. While they may have once allowed closer approach, intensive hunting might have bred wariness into them.

I also had hoped to see a bear, but none were about either of the black or brown (GRIZZ) variety. At a dry camp, tiring of melting bergy bits for water, and running low on stove gas, I went on a bushwhack to find fresh water from one of the streams coming down from the steep mountainsides (most camps were next to streams). I saw two piles of bear scat and that is all. Of course, to call the huge piles "scat" is to imply that they resemble something that Felix the cat leaves in his litterbox. More like scot or maybe schott. Oh heck, let’s just call them enormous piles of shit and I was both happy and sad that they looked months old.

Bald eagles were a daily sight.

We paddled back south and seaward, shifting our schedule to match the afternoon falling tides. From the inside of a tent the everlight makes 9 o’clock look like 2 o’clock look like 8 o’clock. Each night we camped in a bay with another perfect icemelt stream dissolving into the tides. Each camp brought a different mix of bugs. One night was almost exclusively mosquitoes, while another mostly tiny biting flies. I think one of the gulls snatched my headnet, so it was Slimy DEET and the Bugeye Poke Band on stage for the last few nights of the trip. Jess somehow didn’t hear the music through her still-intact headnet.

So you take two people and insert them into a single kayak and place them in a remote set of fjords and bays for a week. They will emerge at the other end either closer together or farther apart. They will certainly get to know each other better. "She leads with a left dip in the water, so when I’m in the rear I lead with my right so when she feels me dip first we will be in synch as she joins in with the paddling." "She doesn’t need coffee in the morning if the time we get up is after noon." They learn to communicate, or learn many ways to avoid communication. Cooperation is essential to survival. Double kayaking is like talking on the phone: you are solidly connected and you can talk freely, but you don’t have to look the other in the eye. And you get to paddle out your frustrations, dissipating emotions and getting to where you need to go at the same time. You achieve goals together. Suffer setbacks. You are forced to see things from a similar perspective day after day. After the trip, a friend described going on a trip like this alone as a couple "brave". We did a lot of talking. We had some heavy issues to discuss. We fortunately had the glacial thunder to drown out the voices at times. We came out of the experience closer, and with more understanding. Faith is only faith, in my book, if it is tested.

Late in the trip, we had the clearest day yet. The snowy spine of the Chugach range was completely uncurtained. Our sunburnt faces were smeared with coconut lip balm, the only salve on the boat with SPF. On that day we watched, far across Port Wells, a coast guard rescue. A C-130 turboprop flew a half hour of cover as a helicopter appeared and hovered for tens of minutes upon the water. We wondered why the hover was so lengthy. We learned upon our return to Whittier that it was a crashed plane. It was the fourth of July. All boats were headed to Whittier for the fireworks. The plane had been flying low and playing chicken with incoming boats, forcing them to veer off their course. So imagine that, the plane crashed. The pilot apparently died enroute to the hospital. Not quite extravagant enough to win a Darwin Award (that would have involved wingwalking or something) but still right up there on the Stupid Dead Dumbshit

Scale. We only hoped that there was not a wife and children somewhere getting a phone call.

Here’s the scene: Near Entry Cove. Ten kayaks on a guided trip paddle by like a pack of well-scrubbed neon cetaceans. Our last day on the boat, on the way to the water taxi pick-up beach. The day cool and the water uncertain like a change of weather. Fish jumping all about. Big fish. A pole is rigged. I am the trolling motor. I say:

"Did you hear somewhere that tugging on the pole like that helps catch fish?"
"No, I’m just teasing them. Luring them. Here fishy-fishy."
"Oh, OK."
"Can seaweed get caught on the hook?"
"It’s possible. The water’s pretty deep here, but we’ve got a lot of line out. It’s always good to reel it in every once in a while to check. Why don’t you do it?"
---reel reel reel---
"Oh yeah, there’s a lot of seaweed, look how the pole bends."
"Are you sure there’s not a fish on it?"
"I don’t feel any tugging."
"OK, keep reeling. That pole sure is bending a lot. You better catch your fish. Yank to set the hook! Let him play, loosen the tension! Let him run if he needs to!"
"I caught a fish!"

It flashed and ran, silvery. Good sized. We didn’t have a net. I thought about trying to grab it beside the boat, but touching a fish usually makes it really thrash, and might unhook it. I thought about paddling to shore and landing it, but that was perilous too. A net, my watery kingdom for a net. Hmm…a shirt?…a drybag?…a headnet! Yes! Bugs be damned. Fetch me your headnet! It was a modest, 10-12 pound Chinook salmon. He was a she, full of roe. A perfect way to end an Alaska trip. We grilled some that night at a friend’s house and took half of it home for another meal. I have never tasted better fish. Have not had fresher salmonid since pulling steelhead from Oregon rivers as a kid.

A tour boat roars by at 30 knots on the way back from a day trip to the same glaciers from which we paddled. They have not heard the thunder all twinight long. They have not seen otters frolic and dive on the slack tides. Not heard the perfect streams splash and settle. Not felt the tug of salmon from a seat inches above the water. Jess claims it was the playful calling of fishy-fishy that did it. I am only a humble and weary trolling motor, hungry at the sight of pink fish filets, and will not dispute such claims.

If perspective is all, then I’d venture that there was no finer place to view this fine world than right there: butt sore, bug bit, and sunburnt, fish in boat and rounding a final point at the end of a fine paddle.